Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia

William Cowper Prime

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783849649678
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

An indispensable talent or element in a writer of a book of travels is so to present every scene and object described that every reader shall seem to be present and go along with the traveler and see everything he sees and through the same eyes. The author of this book has this very desirable element of an agreeable traveler. He has enthusiasm. He has two eyes. They are both wide awake. He sees every thing seeable. His descriptions are graphic, graceful, and mirror-like, into which the reader looks and sees first the traveler himself in the foreground of the picture. Then he sees the Nile, the boat, the shores, the cities, the numerous and varied objects, moving and stationary, living and dead, passing like a panorama before the mind's eye, all the way up the Nile from Alexandria to Nubia, and back again. You seem to hear his voice describing the objects as they pass.... Some may think there are a goodly number of idiosyncrasies. But we like to see and keep an eye on the man we are traveling with, even if we are five thousand miles apart. We advise those who would enjoy a pleasant sail up the Nile to Nubia, without its fatigues and exposures, to buy Mr. Prime's book, and borrow his eyes with which to see the scenes and objects so graphically described.

 

1. Fra Giovanni.

Fra Giovanni was a Franciscan. His face was one that you loved to look at. A calm and beautiful face. Sometimes, when the long black lashes fell over his cheek and his mind went wandering over the hills about San Germano in the fair land of Italy, I used to think I was looking at the face of him of Patmos, the beloved disciple, who, much as he loved the ascended Christ, yet remained longest of all the twelve away from him; and when my friend prayed, as I have seen him pray, with tears, and yet very bright hope, in his eyes, I used to remember the same John, and think I could see his eyes, when he uttered the last fervent prayer that his Lord would come quickly, from whom he had been so long separated.

We met in the theatre at Arles, that old town of the south of France which boasts a rival to the Roman Coliseum. I was sitting in the twilight, with no one but Miriam and the guardian near me, and I was dreaming, as I suppose any enthusiastic American may be permitted to dream the first time he finds his feet on the boards—on the rocks, I should say—of an ancient theatre. The fading light was not unfavorable to such an occupation. Ghosts came at my call and filled the otherwise vacant seats.

I saw fair women, brave men, magistrates, soldiers, senators, and an emperor, yea verily, an emperor, in the seat between the marble columns. There were wrestlers, just come from the games near by in the amphitheatre, standing by the stage, and dancers, and jesters, and masked figures flitting to and fro. All was silent. But the silence grew intolerable, and at length I interrupted it myself.

You need not laugh at me for talking Greek. Those Roman ghosts could understand Greek as well as English, or, for that matter, as well as Latin, and if they knew any thing they should have known Æschylus. So I acted prompter and gave them

“Χθονοςμὲν εἰς τηλουρὸν ἤκομεν πέδον Σκόθην ἑςο ἱμον ἄβροτον εἰς ἑρημίαν,”

whereupon the ghosts vanished. In a flash, in the twinkling of a star, the scene was one of cold bare rocks in the gray twilight, a ruined hall, fallen columns over which countless snails were crawling, and Kaiser and actor were dust of a verity under my feet.

But a voice answered my voice. For in a nook among the confused stones near the stage had been sitting, all this time, a person that I had not seen, whose clear soft voice came pleasantly to me as he hailed congenial company in this place of ruins.

“Who is there, that would renew old and familiar echoes in these walls?”

“Why? Do you think they ever heard that before?”

 “The Prometheus? Yes—why not? There were scholarly days when the fashionable Romans delighted in Greek plays.”

We walked out, all together, and down to the miserable forum and the hotel, where, in the evening, over a bottle of St. Peray that I had brought from Valence with my own baggage, we talked down the hours. Thus I became acquainted with Fra Giovanni—and our acquaintance fast ripened. He was an Italian, young, wealthy, of good family, and a priest. He had not been long an ecclesiastic. There were moments when the former life flashed out through the fine eyes under his cowl. The memory of other times alternately lit and darkened his face. There was some deep grief there of which he never told me, and which I never sought to know. He was a good, gentle, faithful friend. That was enough.

Some time after that, we were standing in the crypt of the cathedral of St John's at Malta. That day we were to separate. I to go eastward, and he to travel he scarcely knew whither, on the work of his sacred calling. Before us, in marble silence, lay the stout Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and a little way off the brave Valetta, sleeping after his last great battle with the Turks, who surrounded this, his rocky fortress.

He who goes to the East should always go by way of Malta. It is a proper stepping-stone between Europe and the Orient, where the last wave of the crusades rolled back from the walls of Jerusalem, and sank in foam.

“You. will find yourself always looking back to this little crypt in the middle of the sea, wherever your footsteps turn,” said Fra Giovanni. “No place in the Mediterranean is so intimately connected with the history of the East as this island of Malta, and there is scarcely any part of the Orient in which you will not be reminded of it. This fact alone, that it is the place of the death and burial of that mighty order who for so great a period swayed the sceptre of power in Europe, is enough to connect it with Egypt and Holy Land, indeed with all the possessions of the Turks. Here, when Valetta was Grand Master, the arms of the Moslem had their first great check, and the followers of the false prophet learned that their boasted invincibility was a fable. Here, too, but yesterday, when the great leader of the French had garrisoned the island, your stout cousins of England, who followed his swift feet as the hounds follow after the deer, drove out his soldiery. You will think of that when you see the boastful inscription of Desaix at the cataract of the Nile. There have been valiant deeds done on this rock. If the sea could have a voice, it would tell of men of might, and deeds of might done here, that are themes for bards who love to celebrate the great acts of men. But the sea is the only living thing that knows them. For there are no trees, nor ancient vines, nor any thing here but the great rock, and the living, moving, throbbing sea around it.”

I don't know but my friend would have talked on all day, had not a gun from the harbor announced that the steamer was heaving up her anchor.

We left the crypt and walked over the splendid floor of the cathedral, which is inlaid with a thousand tombstones of knights of the Cross. I glanced once more at the picture of the Beheading of John, which Caravaggio painted that he might be admitted to the order, and painted in fading colors (water some say) that the evidence of his debasement of the art, and their debasement of the order, might disappear; and then, rushing out into the Strada Reale, and plunging down the steep narrow streets to the landing-place, overturning a half-dozen commissionaires, each of whom swore he was the man that said good-morning the day previous, and became thereby entitled to his five francs (for no one need imagine that he will land at Malta without paying, at least, three commissionaires and five porters, if he carry no baggage on shore, or twice as many, if he have one portmanteau), I parted from Fra Giovanni, with a warm pressure of the hand, a low “God bless you,” and a long, earnest look out of those eyes of John the-Saint.

When the Nubia swung up on the port-chain, with her head to the opening of the harbor, and ran out to sea, she passed close under the Lower Barracka, so close that I could recognize faces on it. In the corner, by the monument of Sir Alexander Ball, I saw my friend. As he recognized me, he waved his hand toward me, and even in that motion I caught his intent; for he, good Catholic that he was, could not let me, his heretic friend, go to sea, and especially to the East, without that last sign of the redemption by way of benediction. I thanked him for it, for he meant it lovingly, and so I was away for the Orient. We met again at the Holy Sepulchre.

Such was my step from the modern world to the ancient. From good old Presbyterian habits and friends to the companionship and affection of a Franciscan brother among the relics of the mediæval world, and then to the heart of Orient; Cairo the Magnificent, el Kahira the Victorious.

2. The Classic Sea.

There is a comfort, when traveling eastward, in meeting Englishmen. You are very certain, in coming in contact with the English pleasure-traveler, to meet a gentleman. Exceptions are very rare. It is also worthy of remark, that the English gentleman, so soon as he learns that you are American, regards you as a fit companion, which is a degree of confidence that he is very far from reposing in one of his own nationality. Englishmen meeting Englishmen, look on one another as so many pickpockets might, each of whom was certain that each of his neighbors meant to rob him on the first available opportunity.

This perhaps arises from the danger that foreign acquaintances may entail unpleasant and impracticable recognitions at home. There is no apprehension of this in meeting Americans, and this may serve to explain a willingness to find society for the time which will not prove troublesome in the future.

But I am disposed to give our cousins over the water more credit for kindred affection. I have always found them cordial, warm-hearted, frank and hearty companions and friends. I was, perhaps, fortunate in those whom I met, but they were many, lords, spiritual and temporal, soldiers, sailors, and shop-keepers; and I found the name of American a pass to their hearts. Some had friends in our new country, and perhaps I had seen and known them—and once or twice I had—all had an idea that we were a race of brave and active men, given to boasting, but good-natured at that, nearly related to them in blood, and allies of England as champions of freedom against the despotisms of the world.

This last idea was one of new and startling force to me, as I looked back from Europe and the East to England and America. The line between freedom and tyranny runs up the British Channel. It is not the broad Atlantic. Our Constitution is of English origin, based on English law, and the boast which we inherit from our revolutionary patriots was, that Britons would never be slaves.

The sea was still. From Marseilles to Malta, in the little mail steamer Valetta, we had experienced a constant gale, sailing almost all the way under water. Ladies had nearly died from the exhaustion of sea-sickness. The day that we passed the straits of Bonifacio was the worst in my memory of bad days at sea. All day long the sea went over us, fore and aft. To live below deck was impossible, the foul air of the little steamer close shut and battened down being poisonous. The ladies who were sea-sick were brought on deck and laid on island cushions around which the water washed back and forth. Here day and night for seventy hours they moaned and shrieked. One of them we thought hourly would die. Miriam and Amy, our American ladies, were brave and good sailors, but the scene was almost too much for them. The gale saw us into the port of Malta, and then flattened down to a calm, and never was there such a beautiful sea as we sailed over to Alexandria. No wind disturbed the profound beauty of that water whose azure I had never before dreamed of. It was a never-ending source of pleasure to lean over the side and gaze into the deep blue, that surpassed the sky in richness, on which the bubbles from the swift prow went dancing gayly before as, white flashing and vanishing, to be followed by others and others, all day and all night long.

The poop cabin had been by some odd chance left vacant, and I had secured it for Miriam and Amy. In a season when the through India passengers crowded the line of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, this was a most fortunate and unexpected occurrence. The cabin was much the pleasantest on shipboard, and they slept in it enough to make up their losses on the Valetta.

I passed the night on deck, and could wake at any hour and recognize the stars over me, that had so often seen me sleeping in western wanderings. The old Englishman who had the wheel on the starboard watch on the first night out from Malta, when he saw the rolling a blanket around me and lying down on a bench, grunted a disapproval of it to himself, and even ventured to his mate at the wheel a remark to the detriment of my eyes, expressing also his belief that I would go below before morning. How he came to be on the watch in the morning I don't know, but he expressed unmitigated delight at my visual organs being unaffected by his remarks, when he saw me start up before the break of dawn in the east, and throw off my blanket and sleep together, while I walked over to the rail and watched to see the coming day.

Let him who would see the magnificence of dawn behold it in the Levant, off the coast of the Pentapolis. It is no matter for wonder that the ancients had such glorious ideas of Aurora and her train. The first rays over the blue horizon were splendid. I gazed to see if Jerusalem itself were not the visible origin of that splendor. Then swift in the track of his rays, came the gorgeous sun, springing out of the sea like a god of triumph, and he went up into the heavens with a majestic pomp that the sun has nowhere but just here. There was on board the ship a Pharsee, with his servants. I did not wonder at that longing gaze with which I saw him looking at his rising god. I, too, had I been taught as he, would die a worshiper of that god of light.

The second-class passengers were a motley crowd. Italian, Maltese, French, Greek, Arab, and Lascar, they lay in heaps along the deck until the pumps sent the water flooding over them when the decks were washed, and then climbed into the rigging and sunned themselves dry. I held a general levee among them...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Fra Giovanni.
• 2. The Classic Sea.
• 3. The Dead of Alexandria.
• 4. Iskandereyeh.
• 5. Cairo the Victorious.
• 6. The Footprints of the Patriarchs.
• 8. La Illah Il Allah.
• 9. Sheik Houssein Ibn-Egid.
• 10. Law and Liberty.
• 11. The Phantom.
• 12. Southward Ho!
• 13. Braheem Effendi El Khadi.
• 14. Manfaloot and Es Siout.
• 15. Thanksgiving Day.
• 16. Life along the River.
• 17. Abd-el-Kader-Bey.
• 18. To Love a Star.
• 19. The City of a Hundred Gates.
• 20. The Ancient Dead at Esne.
• 21. Buying Antiques.
• 22. Edfou.
• 23. The Tower of Syene.
• 24. The First Cataract.
• 25. Moonlight.
• 26. The Nubians.
• 27. The Second Cataract.
• 28. Abou Simbal.
• 29. Northward in Nubia.
• 30. Northward in Egypt.
• 31. Arrakee and Antiques.
• 32. Achmet the Resurrectionist.
• 33. Thebes the Magnificent.
• 34. The Palaces of the Dead.
• 36. The Glory of Karnak.
• 37. Memnon and his Daughter.
• 38. A Turkish Nobleman.
• 39. The Crocodile Pits.
• 40. “Desolate Places.”
• 41. Visions and Realities.
• APPENDIX.
• B. TO TRAVELERS VISITING EGYPT.